


Change is Gonna Do Me Good

by MrWednesday



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Ableism, Alien Culture, Autonomous Droids, Calrissians, F/F, F/M, Graphic Medical Procedure, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Reference to Cultural Norms of Child Abuse, Scarification, Violence, graphic depiction of injury, if people can speak English in space they can speak Turkish in space
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-31
Updated: 2016-06-06
Packaged: 2018-07-11 06:48:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 19,529
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7034314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MrWednesday/pseuds/MrWednesday
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the final moments of the Starkiller disaster, Snoke wrenches himself from Kylo Ren’s mind, severing their bond and leaving him in a catatonic state.  When Kylo’s escape shuttle is shot down by First Order troops, Phasma and Hux - having outlived their use - are accepted as collateral damage.  The General and his Captain must find a way to survive and run while keeping their badly damaged Knight alive. With no one to trust and nowhere to turn, the trio struggle to start their lives over, to find a place to heal their minds and bodies and salvage what is left of Kylo Ren - but the war is far from over, and they can’t hide forever.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> For lack of anyone else to blame, I'd like to lay this at the feet of 20th century adventure novelists John Buchan and Yaşar Kemal.
> 
> I'm much obliged to [Angryangryowl](https://angryangryowl.tumblr.com/) for the divine art and their tremendous patience, and to [GenerallyHuxurious](https://generallyhuxurious.tumblr.com/) for their encouragement on my draft.
> 
> The title is from Honky Cat by Elton John, because why wouldn't it be.

“General, they’re not opening the hangar.” 

General Hux set down the bloody needle with the excruciating deliberateness of a man who’d far rather be throwing it across the room. He stepped back from the gurney, making room for Phasma to take over attending to the writhing man who lay there, and followed the pilot’s voice to the front of the shuttle. The craft was small and cramped, no more than a trooper carrier. In the disarray of Starkiller’s final hours, it hadn’t been cleaned since its deployment on Takodana. Bootprints of trodden vegetation streaked the filthy floor. The lifesupport filters pumped the room with air reeking of unwashed blood and blaster grease. 

Hux crowded into the cockpit behind to copilot’s seat to take their report. The scene from the viewport was crowded with a motley assortment of vessels, the fully equipped ships that had been orbiting the planet at the time of the Resistance’s attack, and the few command carriers they could scramble after the Supreme Leader gave to order to abandon their position. Rather, after Hux was ordered to abandon their position. Hux understood that the Supreme Leader was not of a military mind, and was adept at interpreting his commands so as to best serve their martial strength. 

Below them a small planet reflected a sea of yellow and reds into the chasm of space. They’d been coasting in the shadow of the flagship since the fleet had dropped out of lightspeed, but not that they were free of Starkiller’s blast radius it really was imperative that they board a larger vessel. Ren’s condition appeared to be worsening, and Hux needed to calm the troops and coordinate the retreat.

“Perhaps it was damaged by debris. I’ll have to pull back.” Their small ship had been on a trajectory to land inside the Finalizer, but with nowhere to go they swooped beneath it to avoid a collision course.

“Has the Finalizer reported structural damage?”

The pilot hesitated. “Sir, they’re not responding to our hail.”

“None of the ships have responded?” Phasma had done all she could for Ren at the moment, and had come to stand at attention behind the General, attention riveted to the fleet drifting before them.

“No sir.”

Hux clasped his hands tightly behind his back, gripping hard to suppress any inclination to fidget. “A malfunction on all channels is unlikely.”

Phasma widened her stance as if the looming danger was going to burst into the cabin and face them head-on. “I don’t like it, sir.”

That a coup could form so quickly in the wake of this disaster was improbable. Who to incite it? Colonel Tarkin had been posted in orbit on the Valiant since Starkiller had requested backup - an ambitious grasper she was, no doubt, but this? No. Not alone, not without being bequeathed some legitimacy by the higher command. She never would have carried it out unless by the Supreme Leader’s approval. Hux stared into pitiless space, certain of all of this but unwilling to despair before his subordinates. They understood their position as well as he did. Hux stood tall in resignation. The cold steel of Phasma’s armor pressed along his side.  
He released a long, slow breath.

They watched on the array as ventral cannons came online in unison, twisting to lock onto their position. The nature of the Finalizer’s silence was unmistakable. “Commence evasive maneuvers.”

To his credit, the trooper asked no questions, performing a neat spin and engaging thrusters, sending them plummeting towards the planet just as bright bolts of laserfire seared through the air.

“Secure Ren.” Phasma tore her eyes from the rapidly approaching planet and ran to the back of the shuttle. The hull shuddered dangerously as they plummeted through the atmosphere. Sirens rang out. Hux flattened his back against the hull and slapped the release on the emergency belts to pin himself in place. The pressurized snap of the straps knocked the air from his lungs. He hung limp against the wall of the cockpit as they spun through the atmosphere. Over the buzzing in his ears, he heard the two troopers shouting to one another, attempting to maintain control. The engine struggled as any protruding hardware was sheared off by the speed of their descent. Both radar and their viewports were blinded by the sandstorm, and they could do nothing to guide their landing, only brace themselves and attempt to cut their velocity.

A jagged tooth of stone thrust through the transparisteel of the cockpit. The shuttle shrieked to a halt, embedded in the cliffside. The pilot was a mess of viscera streaked across the cabin floor. He would have died instantly. The shuttle groaned dangerously around them, the tortured grind of twisted metal. Before Hux could release himself from the wall, gravity dragged the shuttle further down the rock, gauging deeper into the windshield. A segment of the decimated control panel carved loose and tumbled back, striking Hux across the temple and searing vivid strips of skin with its exposed overheated prongs. He hissed in pain and stepped free of his restraints, wobbling slightly on his feet, and followed the one surviving trooper to the back of the ship.

It was astonishing that they’d only lost one man. Given the speed at which they fell and the furious sandstorm that whipped through the canyon, steering would have been impossible this close to the planet. Through the fall of dust, Hux could just make out their position. It was uncanny, but they appeared to have landed in a cave mouth of some kind, beneath the clifftop plateau. The red cliffs of this planet had been sandblasted for centuries by the constant storms that boiled through the atmosphere, gouging deep winding canyons in the rock. Their precarious perch wedged in the cliffside was beyond lucky. By all rights they should have been a contorted heap of debris at the bottom of the canyon by now.

Hux didn’t trust the Force, but he trusted luck even less. It could only have been Ren, indesposed as he was. His body still lay limp, clothes torn back where they’d sought out his injuries to slap on provisionary bacta patches. Hux wondered how strong self-preservation kept him, even in this state. 

Phasma had pried open the dented doors, revealing a tunnel which grew shallow sharply as it trailed into the dark. Just beyond the edge of their shuttle, muted light filtered through. The narrow mouth of their cave was heaped with drifts of silt, disturbed by the crash but treacherous underfoot.

Cautious of how he’d react if he came awake, Phasma and Hux swiftly lifted Ren’s long heavy frame from the shuttle and settled him on a hastily unfolded insulating foil. Hux pulled the robes aside gently at first, uncertain if whatever unconscious power had settled the shuttle safely would perceive the contact as a threat.

It was dark beneath the storm, and it only grew worse as evening came and the temperature dropped. If the Order was so thorough as to pursue them onto the planet it would be impossible to locate them before sunrise. They were trapped for the night, but relatively safe.

The routine of training flooded right back. Phasma set the trooper to unloading the shuttle, pulling everything of use deeper into the cave. She and Hux worked in silence to save their precious cargo, staunching Ren’s wounds. Phasma threw down her gloves and flipped through the medkit with quick practiced movements. The shuttle had not been restocked since Takodona, severely limiting their options. Hux pulled out the shears. He cut away the tattered fabric of Ren’s thick tunic, exposing an broken line of crackling scorched flesh. He left it for the moment. The pulpy gouge in Ren’s side demanded more immediate attention. They’d cleaned it of shrapnel and bandaged it aboard the shuttle, but the crash had set it to bleeding again. Hux pressed around the jagged wound, trying to find the edges of the injury. Blood pulsed over his hands. Tightly bandaging it with bacta was the best they could do for now, but they’d likely have to stitch it again in the morning, once the bleeding slowed. Ren was out cold, and made not so much as a flinch or moan.

With Ren’s punctures as clean as they could make them, Phasma and Hux sat back to wipe their hands of blood and see to their own scrapes. Phasma’s arms and shoulders were dappled with bruises, fresh from the impact and her previous tumble into the base’s trash compactor. The chute had been long and winding, but Phasma had been clever enough to spread her limbs before she could gather too much momentum, bracing herself against the sides. The climb back up had been hellaciously slippery, several times sending her tumbling back down into the bend.

Phasma tossed Hux a tube of ointment for the shiny pink burns on his face - a numbing gel really, that would do little but relieve the pain. They’d expended the more potent medicines on Ren’s mortal injuries.

Phasma shoved down her cowl and scrubbed a hand through her sweaty bristly hair, no an inch longer than regulation standard. Officer cadets and stormtroopers alike were shown the pictures of a mutilated trooper, having scalped themselves when past-regulation hair had caught on their helmet and it was torn off in battle. It left an impression.

Hux had worn his hair in a similar style for most of his childhood. There were far too many things for long hair or loose clothing to catch on as he followed his mother through the bowels of the Insurrector, always the shadow at her heels. Long and narrow, little Hux was often called upon to crawl under and behind where others couldn’t reach, or assist the droids with fine repairs, and his fair hair never grew past half an inch. But he’d felt no stranger for it, the same was true of most of the ship’s crew. Pilots, engineers, repairmen, all lined up in the mess hall on the first of every month, taking turns shaving each other down to the scalp. It was the mark of someone doing important work, and made him feel terribly grown up. 

When his entry date at the academy approached, his father intervened, concerned that he look entirely like an officer in front of his fellow cadets. Growing out his hair had felt like a demotion, losing his place in that ritual, and the first and only time the Commandant caught him trying to do it himself he cuffed him so hard his ears bled. He’d been incensed by the tickle of bangs across his forehead and greased his hair into place the first chance he got. He tried to grow it out to emulate the chief technicians, several of whom wore their hair long in tight plaits, every errant hair pinned in place. His father refused this also. It was not in the fashion in Arkanis. He’d later come to understand his father’s directive, and the merits of not arriving on Arkanis looking like a stormtrooper to a cadre that conceived of them only as cannon fodder, the lowest rung of human capacity.

His helmet removed, their trooper copilot was revealed to be human, a well-built blond man perhaps several years younger than Hux himself, with a homely and serious complexion prematurely aged by a brow wrinkled in an expression of perpetual concentration. An old scar bisected one nostril, and his nose was skewed at such an angle that had it doubtlessly been broken at least once, and mended badly. The level of care suggested that it had taken place in his former life, before he was taken up for trooper training. 

Child snatchers the Resistance called them, as if it was worth anyone’s time or bother to storm into homes and abduct babes from their mothers laps. The Resistance officers had never taken Development & Infrastructure at the Academy, never mapped corpora of census data, tracking astonishing child mortality rates throughout the Outer Reaches. A byproduct of malnutrition and the dearth of medical resources, worsening unchecked by the Republic. The best an orphaned or abandoned child could hope for out there was to be sold into apprenticeship, a kind word for a position that consisted of sweeping their Master’s floors, stacking firewood, spreading their legs when their Master bid it, all between bracing their backs against the belt - and if they survived, perhaps receiving tutelage in a trade once they reached pubescence. Adoption, Hux knew, was a luxury reserved to more rarefied circles, cities like those on the Core Planets - no one in the outskirts or mining planets was looking for an extra mouth to feed. 

Phasma was old enough to remember, and they shared a kinship in those early days, lean street dogs banded together. Even now, she hunched over her cold rations as though they’d be snatched from her at any moment. Licking crumbs from her fingers, she idly traced a ripple of paler stone in the wall. “I can’t make sense of it, sir. There was great admiration for you. Amongst the rank and file. It was seeking the map that resulted in the scavenger’s presence on Starkiller.” Hux was tempted to agree. He considered himself a man who could take his licks when they were due. A leader must be a sound judge before all else - the Commandant had taught this as the cornerstone of command. This intemperance did not reflect the wisdom of an ancient omnipotent being. He observed Ren’s hulking form - perhaps he came by it honestly after all.

Hux shook his head. “The rank and file know little of the hunt for Skywalker, or the details of what followed. They shan’t weep at my departure.”

The realities of their situation were undeniable. Snoke would never have risked his apprentice in order to destroy them unless Ren himself was forsaken. So either Ren was the target, and both Hux and Phasma inconsequential collateral, or he intended to annihilate the First Order’s Command Triumvirate in a single swath. It was remarkable that Phasma had caught up with Hux before he went in search of Ren - was that Snoke’s hand at play? Bring them all together, so that they might be more easily disposed of? Hux took a deep breath, mourning for a long clear moment the ruin of what his parents died to build. He breathed out. There was no time to dwell. 

“The wake of this decision will surely call the Supreme Leader’s judgement into question,” said Phasma.

They turned to Ren’s prone body, the last order they’d received, courtesy of the Supreme Leader’s judgement. But Snoke had disposed of them all. Perhaps there was no reason at all to try saving his apprentice. 

Phasma sat back, smile twisting. “Imagine he lives though. Imagine we abandon him here, the Force drags him to his feet and sets him on a path of vengeance furious and undying.”

Hux could just pfassking imagine it. Ren lumbering through the wastes, one arm hanging off, face rotting open, staggering from planet to planet like a corrupted droid still driven by singular purpose. Haunting their trail, far back at first but unshakable and unsleeping, inexorably catching up on their lead. Until one night they could run no more, and would lay down to rest. They’d be awoken by the hot plink of blood on their noses and cheeks, and look up only to find him there, perched over them in the rafters and bleeding from the teeth like a werebat. Mercifully, Ren was an impatient torturer, a fault for which Hux had often chastised him, so at least they’d have quick deaths to look forward to - either having their minds torn asunder under his long greedy hands or being pummeled to paste barehanded. Hux had plucked up Ren’s sabre when the troopers were hauling him out of the snow, but it rattled worryingly in his grip, it’s flawed crystal finally shattered. 

“We can kill him or save him.” Phasma glanced pointedly at his exposed flesh, undamaged from their crash, the smoking shuttle still gripping the cliffside. Neither mentioned the rending earth that tore away the scavenger after Ren fell in battle, before she could land the final blow. “And I don’t know if we can bet on being able to kill him all the way.”

Phasma hesitated, but set back her shoulders and faced him straight-on. “There is one more thing, sir. About the shield generator.” Hux raised a hand quieting her confession. What could it matter here, without the possibility of a military tribunal, where demotion meant nothing. Yet she told him this not with defiance, but genuine regret. She truly was the finest soldier he’d ever known. “You trusted your troopers to respond immediately, as they’d been trained to do. Trust is vital to command, a leader who cannot place faith in his subordinates will be paralysed with impotence. I’ve never had call to regret my faith in your abilities Captain, and the events of today have not changed that.” 

“Sir.”

“It is… regretful, that you find yourself consigned to my fate. But were I given the choice, there is no one I would rather face this with.”

“I wish I could say the same, Sir. Rumor has it Lieutenant Thannisson is ready and willing to drink his own piss.”

Hux broke character. “Is he?” The present-tense was no more than a habit, Hux had no idea if Thannisson had made it onboard the ships.

Phasma was a master of the level voice, but a masked life had eroded her poker face entirely. “There are alleged health benefits.” Her nose crinkled when she smiled, and it was impossible not to imagine a hundred incidences of her directing her bone-dry deadpan at Hux or Ren, and smiling just like this all the while.

“I see. Well. A formidable survival skill. No offense taken, Captain, I can’t fault your choice.”

 

A search of the shuttle’s toolbox turned up a technicians lamp, a thin strip of light to be worn across the forehead for close work. Hux cinched it over his hair. If the fuel cells remained intact, they’d be the most valuable of the ship’s portable parts. Now was no time to be drawing attention to themselves by demanding shelter and sustenance in the name of the Order. Hux pried back the panel. Four out of six. Not bad. Elbow deep in the heart of the ship, Hux turned to watch YT-980 tug loose the pilot’s missing arm from where it was pinned between the stone and the shuttle floor. There was a great deal of wiggling involved. Finally the joint snapped and the arm came free. It was added to the pile. Hux returned to his work.

Phasma directed YT-980 in disposing of the pilot’s body. Hux’s brief survey of the planet hadn’t bothered with nonsentient flora and fauna, and any scavengers in the canyons would be drawn to the slowly putrefying flesh smeared across the cockpit. In the end, they could do little more than scoop up with worst of it and toss it over the ledge as far away as they could manage. It would still bring any predators to the foot of their perch, but hopefully they’d be content with the meal of a single trooper. 

The shuttle’s supplies included a foldable camp stove, but they’d nothing to cook with it. They plucked out the combustible jelly and stowed it in their packs. Every piece of the gear was stamped in the First Order’s emblem, a death sentence most anywhere in the galaxy after the destruction of the Hosnian system.

 

Shortly after nightfall, as they laid out their bedrolls, the pilot was discovered. Undulating shrieks and coughing barks echoed up from below, the shredding and cracking of a corpse between teeth. “Sounds like tsekik dogs, Sir,” said Phasma. “Just dessert scavengers. Hell of a racket but no real danger unless you’re incapacitated.” There was a faint scrabbling of nails against stone that seemed to come closer, and they all tense, but the sounds subsided.

 

YT-980 woke Hux just before dawn to take the next watch. There wasn’t much to watch for - their wouldn’t be much to see until their enemies were upon them, and they could hardly hear themselves over the aching howl of the wind trapped between the rocks, but Hux refused to have come this far only to be executed in his sleep. Hux waited until YT-980 was kneeling on his bedroll to break his neck with a neat sharp twist. The trooper had expended his usefulness. Piloting was his only specialized skill, and he had no sense of guile or subterfuge to aid them in enemy territory. And it was all enemy territory now. The political situation would be volatile, after the decimation of the Republic, and Hux had once drafted intricate plans to harness that chaos, but now their only hope was for discretion.

Ren twitched. Hux felt judged. Ren’s one exposed eye roamed listlessly, catching on nothing, and Hux wondered if he’d seen the businesslike execution at all, or merely felt the stormtrooper’s death through the Force.

Ren had once watched him kill a man in a similar fashion. In a bolthole somewhere in, before Hux was quite senior enough to avoid the front lines. “No blaster? Does it give you pleasure, Major, to feel a man lose his life between your hands?” Hux had rolled his eyes at Ren’s ceaseless theatrics. Then, as now, he’d wanted to stay quiet so as not to reveal their location. “I didn’t want blood to ruin the clothes,” he’d told Ren. “I’m not dressed for the season, I’ll need the layers.”

Phasma noticed YT-890’s body rolled to one side when she woke up, but made no mention of it. Instead she settled down on the dust floor to polish her armour one last time. The chrome helmet was regrettably iconic, and too conspicuous by half. She sat with it in her lap, and stared into the dark eyes. They’d have to leave it behind. Hux left her to it. Phasma had found a bolt of roughspun cloth among the supplies the night before, and wound it neatly in practiced movements over her face and hair. She’d saved a scrap of the yardage for Hux, and he pulled it across his nose and mouth, knotting it tightly in the back of his head.

The least conspicuous bag among their supplies was a grey fieldkit with a raised duraplast patch with the First Order star. Hux held a lighter to it, melting it beyond recognizability. The final product looked like it had been salvaged from a battlefield or trashheap. It was ideal. Hux packed it up with the fuel cells, what little currency they’d found aboard the shuttle, and all the rations he could carry. He stuffed their sleepsacks into a single pouch and looped it through with rope so he could carry it on his shoulders. Phasma had folded up the insulating foils they’d wrapped around Ren, and he stowed those as well. Across the back of his back he strapped a pole he’d ripped from the wall of the shuttle, and a blaster with it’s distinctive white embellishments snapped off, the best they could do for weapons beyond the knives they carried on their person.

With a resigned sigh he pulled off his stiff shirt and johdpurs, replacing them with a set of plain black trooper sweats. The sleeves drooped down over his hands, and he was forced to cinch the drawstrings tightly to hold the pants over his waist, but it would do. The fitted bodyarmour he wore beneath his uniform remained. It was of an insulating design, requisitioned specifically for his posting overseeing his Starkiller. It would be sweltering on this planet, but he was loathe to leave it behind when they knew not what lay ahead.

Packed amongst the medical supplies was a tan bodybag with reinforced straps on each end and a longer one running the length of it. They were designed for soldiers to carry bodies back from the field. Rarely was energy expended on retrieving the First Order’s own corpses, but it was occasionally necessary to retrieve important officers or enemy combatants for proof of death. They tried to be mindful of Ren’s injuries as they zipped him inside it, but they had a rough road ahead, and if the Force didn’t continue to keep him alive there wasn’t much more they could do for him. With a huff of effort, Phasma slung him over her shoulder like a market lamb, adjusting the long strap across her chest to hold him more firmly in place.

The crucial decision: to go up, or down? Hux had hoped the winds would settle overnight, but they showed no signs of lessening.

Phasma stood at his side. “Easy pickings for an ambush down in the canyons, but the plateaus are untraversable in this weather.” 

Hux nodded in grim assent. “We’ll have to risk it.”

The cliff was too sheer, and the visibility too poor, to chance it barehanded. The crumbly stone would have presented a formidable challenge even to a climber of consider practice, which neither of them were. They scrutinized the ship’s hold in the cliff. If they judged it wrong and trusted it with their weight, they could be halfway to the ground when several tonnes of metal came careening down on their heads. The decided against it, and secured their ropes along several points in the cave wall.

Hux readied himself to go first. Bearing extra cargo, Phasma would be more vulnerable in her descent. If necessary, he would defend their position so Phasma could concentrate on lowering herself and Ren intact.

 

It had been a long time since Hux had needed to climb. First Order equipment was state of the art, but it hadn’t always been so. One particular sargent at the academy was fond of tossing them into the wilderness to fend for themselves; the duel merits of being pitless, and light on resources. Hux threaded the rope through his legs and up diagonally right to left across his chest, tossing it back over his shoulder and gripping it tight in his breaking hand. The friction tore at the shoulder and thigh of the trooper’s sweats, but his bodyarmour spared his body the worst of it.

With no better solution available, Phasma clipped the straps of Ren’s bodybag to the belaying loop so that it hung between her legs. Sweat glinted in the sun, caught in the fine blond hairs of her powerful forearms, straining under their combined weight. “We could just toss him,” she called out between pants. “Maybe the Force will cushion his fall. Her devil-may-care smile was accompanied by a jerk of her chin, a mannerism typical among the troops who’d grown accustomed to emoting without their faces.

Whatever had come for the pilot had left no scrap behind. There was only a russet brown stain gritted over with fresh sand.

Hux had poured over countless terrain surveys of the planets in the district when appraising candidates for his Starkiller. As crash-sites went, they could have done worse Dal’Rassa. This sector was littered with bald unterriformed moons, free of atmosphere or life forms. If pilot hadn’t steered into the storm, they’d all be dead already. Perhaps. Who knew the extent of what Ren could endure. The compass had survived intact - preliminary scans had indicated a settlement to the east, too small to even merit deploying troopers to clear and secure it. There had been concerns that the canyons and sandstorms would provide cover for a Resistance hideaway in a strategic location, but the planet’s few inhabitants were employed by drug farmers, and they were hardly the sort to take risks for their ideals.

Phasma fiddled with the straps, trying to distribute Ren’s weight evenly across her shoulders and back.

“In the Pretyet they wear reptile skulls in a little pouch around their necks. For luck.” Hux caught the hitch in her voice, the little pause at the end where should would have normally called him ‘sir’. He sighed grimly. They both had habits to unlearn. 

“They’d be lighter, at least.”

The air at the bottom of the canyons was hot and close, though the direct sun didn’t seem to reach this far unless it hung directly over the narrow fissure at the top. A faint rain of dust hung suspended in the air, settling gently in Hux’s hair and shoulders, accumulating in the folds of Phasma’s scarf. Hux held his walking pole in front of them, prodding the path ahead to scare up any arachnids or snakes that slept between the shifting stones.

He dug out some of the dry rations he’d stuffed in his pockets, tossing one to Phasma. “Oh.” He’d held it up to tear it open with his teeth, and noticed for the first time the label. “They’re the groundnut ones.” Strange to be pleased with so inconsequential a detail, in light of their predicament. 

Phasma huffed. “They’re my favorite too.”

Stranded and vulnerable as they were, training dictated stealth, but the the echoing chambers of the close cliffs thwarted any such ambitions. Silence is impossible, and their only hope was that if they weren’t alone in the canyons, at least triangulating the source of any noise would be similarly problematic.

Ren was liable to thrash and now and again his eyes fluttered open, but it was clear he saw nothing, didn’t seem to register that anyone was near. Hux offered to carry him. Phasma caught his eye and laughed, a little breathlessly. In the life that was rapidly fading behind them, Hux would no doubt have come down like a ton of bricks on any such insubordination or disparagement of his capabilities, but there was no sense in arguing with Phasma. He was strong, and as his gym spotter she knew precisely how much, but narrow as he was, placing such a weight on his shoulders, and attempting to traverse this unsteady ground, Hux would no doubt have ended up with his face in the dirt after five steps, tearing open Ren’s tentatively healing wounds for his trouble.

“What shall we call each other, Captain?”

“Haven’t you a name other than Hux?”

“Nothing official. There was never a need. No siblings, you know.” Young Hux sufficed, or just Hux often enough, his father the Commandant, his mother Chief Engineer. He neglected to mention that he did have a whistle. The Insurrector was the size of a small city, its engine rooms crowded and cavernous and voices didn’t carry well. They relied on comms, but when hands were occupied or worse, stuck, the technicians fell into a habit of whistles to catch each others attention. And Hux had had one just for him. When he was big enough to leave his mother’s side they became a sort of call and response, just their names. I’m here - I’m here. Touching base when he was too long from her side, checking in throughout the day. Shrill trilling pitches ringing clear over hissing steam, the clank of cooling metal.

Hux cringed at the prospect. “I suppose you must call me something. Eoin will suffice.”

Phasma hummed a little, thinking. “Shāhanshāh,” she suggested. 

Hux’s laugh was a brittle wheeze caught in his dry throat. “Not exactly inconspicuous.” It’s what her fellow troopers had called her before she’d attained the rank of Captain. It was the name of a valley, the site of the battle where she’d made her bones for the First Order. The Resistance were holded up in a citadel high in the mountains. They had the tactical advantage, and it was quickly apparent that a ground assault would end in disaster, but the deployed troops hadn’t the equipment to survive for long in the planet’s quasi-toxic atmosphere. It had been a deliberate gambit by a particularly callous Admiral, his idea of vetting a new class of troopers. Their only chance of safety was the sealed enclave the local populace had built inside the citadel, and so with no other choice they’d hurled themselves against the walls of their enemies. 

Phasma had allowed herself to be caught in the first wave, feigning injury. Imprisoned in their camp, she’d waited for nightfall before slipping free of her bonds and tearing them apart from the inside like a hatched parasite shreding its way out of its host. She hadn’t gone by that name in years, but it carried a legend in the rank and file of the First Order, a story still told with pride to new initiates, a mantle for them to grow into. It occurred to Hux that in her stonefaced modesty, Phasma had lived with the assumption that her fellow troopers could and would have done the same in her position, and consequently didn’t realize how far the name had spread, that parents on Republic planets probably warned their children that Shāhanshāh would come in the night if they didn’t eat their vegetables or clean out the bird’s cage. 

“What else did they call you? Before academy Training Corps?”

Phasma shrugged. “I don’t remember. But the desert where I was born had a name.”

“Yes?”

“Niobe.”

It was short, at least. “Do you like it?”

Phasma gazed into the distance for a moment, considering. She repeated the name under her breath. “Yes. Niobe. Yes, I think so.”

The demands of the present were too pressing to linger on what they left behind, and it was almost too easy to treat this like they were on maneuvers, a training mission. Hux grinned mirthlessly as he considered their mission parameters. Move cargo from point A to point B, don’t get intercepted by enemy combatants, first round was on the winner. Point A, the only life they’d ever known, Point B, somewhere Hux could sit and think about what the hell they were going to do. The enemy combatants: anyone and everyone, until proven otherwise.

The canyons grew deeper as they walked, darker and cooler, but the dust less bothersome. Once or twice they reached a dead end, an unscalable wall of sandy red stone, and were forced to backtrack, losing hours of walking. Hux mapped their trail on a small padd, trying to anticipate the shape of their surroundings. At night they shook out their clothes as best they could, hissing in pain at the sores disrobing revealed. The fine dust stuck to sweat and rubbed relentlessly at their skin, their bodies a patchwork of friction burns and sun sores. There was only a little of the numbing ointment left, and the shared it between them, using most of it on the livid blister the bodybag’s strap had raised over Phasma’s shoulder. As a ranking officer Hux had grown accustomed to privacy, but he wasn’t so long out of the Academy that he’d managed to relearn modesty. Phasma had seen him in decontamination showers after gas attacks, he’d seen her bare and laid out with medbay as a droid gathered a thousand shards of shrapnel from her thighs and abdomen. Here, more than ever before, they were soldiers in arms before all else.

Ren’s skin was grey with bloodloss, but the crater in his hip was stitching itself together at a promising rate. Try as they might they were never free of the dust, and it agitated the cracked weeping skin of Ren’s burns. If he didn’t wake soon to eat something, he’d grow too weak to heal himself. They could only expect the Force sustained him instead.

They tucked themselves into hollow between boulders, huddling against the wind, but despite their exhaustion, sleep was slow in coming.

When deeper sleep came, a sweet relief after this fleeting restless doze, Hux knew immediately something wasn’t right. The sleep was too deep, too sudden, a cloying heavy thing. It clung to his mind, sticky and close, dragging him downward and Hux wrestled back mounting panic, thrashing toward the surface. He tried to concentrate on the physical sensations of his body, the grit caught in the corners of his mouth, the sores, the burning streaks over his cheek, the cold of the stone underneath him, but even when he managed to open his eyes his limbs were sluggish as if trapped in amber.

Hux dragged himself awake, heart pounding a furious staccato in his chest. Phasma’s eyes were open, round with terror, but her body lay twisted and stiff. One hand reached out for him twitching forward only millimeters at a time. All at once she broke free of whatever had seized her and her hand sprang forward to grip his shoulder as she gasped for breath. He caught her elbow and pulled her off her back so that she might more easily catch her breath. They turned as one to watch Ren. Whatever held him sought to take them as well. They shook and slapped him, a poured water over his face, but there was no waking him. They could only carry his body, and leave his mind in that place.


	2. Chapter 2

It took them three days to reach the mouth of the canyon, limping like stray dogs. Dunes of silt heaped against the cliffside, giving way to a immense plain. They staggered toward the sound of distant voices. The tips of the blue grass brushed their shoulders. This close, it was clear their purpose, disguising at a distance the true crops. Growing at waist level were dark dustly stalks, each topped with a bulbous young seedpods. The harvesters scored the plump pods with sharp little knives, walking to the next one as viscous milk beaded up over the plants’ wounds. The older shriveled pods were crosshatched with dark gouges where the dried milk had been scraped away, tucked away in the leather pouches the harvesters wore about their necks.

It spoke to what a pathetic figure they must have cut that their arrival didn’t garner so much as a twitch from the guards that strolled through the winding paths. Even in its unrefined form blakgum was immensely valuable, but none of the field wardens reached for the long antique blasters strapped across their backs. There was nowhere to hide a shuttle in this terrain and no cover should they snatch up sheaf of plants and run - even running flat out, they’d be gunned down in seconds and never come close to the refuge of the valley or the village in the cliffs.

Hux wasn’t sure how good their Basic was, but there wasn’t much to say. His reports had said the cliff villagers were quiet people - when they could so rarely hear one another over the scream of the wind, it seemed reasonable that one might fall out of the habit. There was a redness to their skin, but not the glowing rawness that Phasma and Hux suffered. It was deeper, warmer, not unlike the stone around them, and Hux couldn’t decide if it was the stain of a life coated in ferrous dust or something inherent to their kind.

Hux offered a fuel cell, and they were led to the stairs hewn into the rock, along which dwellings had been chiseled out of the cliff face. They were encouraged to leave their heavy packs in one of the lower rooms, but they clung to their possessions. The villagers say the bodybag across Phasma’s shoulders and tutted sadly, pointed to how her nails were cracked and bleeding from clinging to the rock, dragging up her own weight and Ren’s. It amused Hux, that these villagers clearly thought them destructively sentimental. 

An older woman, who would not tell them her name, set up a wooden screen for them in her single-roomed cave, behind which they could sleep, and brought them plates of flat bread and bland bean paste. Out of the wind, sun and sand for the first time in days, Phasma and Hux couldn’t find the will to maintain keeping watch. They tied their packs to their belts, and slept each with an arm wrapped over Ren, so that nothing could be taken from them without their waking, and collapsed for the better part of a day. 

In the relative calm of the night hours, Hux crept to the edge of their cave and watched spindles descending, bouncing and tapping against the cliffside as they spun. The rising wind buffeted and flung the spindles on their long, impossibly fine threads, torqueing the yarn until it curled back onto itself, and the spinners teased out more fiber, distributing the tension. Their host held a basket of the fibre, some sharp flaxen plant matter, perhaps pulled and dried from the tall grasses that grew out in the plain. This close, he could see that her hands were criss-crossed with decades’ worth of fine scars, and blood welled in the crook of her pointer finger where the tension of the narrow thread cut into skin cracking with dryness and use.

Hux sat beside her for a while. He asked about bacta, even offered another fuel cell, but life was hard on Dal’Rassa, and supply deliveries infrequent. He traded the cell for a little waxen envelope of blakgum to chew for pain.

They waited until their host had gone to sleep to tend to Ren. Phasma held him steady and Hux held his breath as he peeled back the gritty wrappings, gagging on putrid sweetness. Silt rained into his lap, caked into the bandage’s folds. The wrappings came away wet, sticky with pus and soft new skin. The burns had burst, and they flushed clean the open skin as well as they could. His cheeks were red and tender with infection, so they fed him the last sachet anticontaigen tablets from the shuttle’s medkit, grinding them into a fine powder and tipping it onto his tongue. It wouldn’t be enough. 

Ren’s body was more pliable today, and he swallowed sluggishly when they fed him some water and a few spoonfulls of the bean paste. He showed no signs of dehydration or starvation, but neither Phasma nor Hux trusted that he could live on the Force alone.

They considered how best to feed him the blakgum without choking him in the process. Hux vaguely imagined chewing it up himself and spitting it into the invalid’s mouth, but couldn’t reconcile doing that to Phasma, leaving them both foggy and lost to the world. He rolled the thick paste into a ball between his palms as he’d seen the scrapers do, and carefully pulled Ren’s mouth open. He was tempted to just drop it in, but their luck being what it was, the blackgum would inevitably fall to the back of his throat and block his air. Perhaps that would be the last of him, or perhaps he would come up swinging. Hux would have to tuck the ball between Ren’s teeth and his cheek. It would stain his teeth, but no matter - it would have to dissolve on its own, it was the best they could do for him. He warily reached in to place the drug. Teeth pinched down on the end of his fingers. Hux snatched back his hand and slapped his patient on instinct. The Knight didn’t react. Annoyed with Ren, annoyed with himself, he reached back in to make sure the drug wasn’t dislodged.

They left Ren to his rest, and tucked ravenously into stale flatbread and more of the pinkish paste. In the morning, they would trade the last of their fuel cells and currency for passage off the planet, and plan their next move. If the First Order dispatched a search party to Dal’Rassa, the cliff village would be one of the first places they looked. They were straightening out their bedrolls to get a bit more rest before sunrise, when they caught a faint whisper. They went still, listening.

“He’s gone.”

They turned back, but Ren was already slack once more against the sheets. Hux lept upon him, shaking his shoulder. “Who’s gone? Snoke? Do you mean to say that he’s dead or-” 

Phasma laid into him with a voice of command honed over thousands of troopers. “Ren. You must wake up, this is important.” But he was dead weight in her arms.

 

The only ship in the village was designed for product transport, not personnel carry, and there were no seats beyond the pilot’s own. Their host led them back past stacked crates of blakgum, to a small hold sectioned off with metal mesh and a padlocked door. “To keep you away from cargo,” she explained.

“Why doesn’t he just put the cargo in the cage,” Phasma suggested, “with us outside?”

Her back teeth sparkled when she smiled, capped with precious metal. “He knows cargo won’t wring his neck when he turns his back, try to steal his ship, all it holds. He doesn’t know this about you.”

“It’s faultless logic,” Hux conceded, reluctantly.

“And the only way off this planet, unless Tarkin get’s around to sending a search party,” said Phasma. “We’ll leave Dal’Rassa in a cage either way.”

There wasn’t enough room to lay Ren out on the floor, so the sat him against the back wall, tucked into a corner to keep him up. Their host came back again to introduce their pilot, Ince Raoda, a sturdy older man with a graying moustache and on open, weathered face. He smiled at them. “Very tall!” he observed approvingly. He nodded to where Phasma’s shoulder brushed up against the walls. “No electric,” he assured them. Upon closer inspection, the mesh of the cage was interwoven with fine red wire that could run a charge if he so wished. “Unless we need it, yes?”

It wasn’t so much a threat as a friendly warning. They were strangers, stored amongst his livelihood, and he had no reason to trust them. They didn’t take it personally. “Thank you,” said Phasma, bowing her head politely.

They dozed in the dark. It was chilly in the hold, but not intolerable. Orange glowing heat panels along the ceiling flickered on at regular intervals, accompanied by a high electric whine. It was a measure born of more pragmatism than consideration - the formation of ice crystals would interfere with the blakgum’s consistency - but appreciated nonetheless. 

They had more of the flatbread and starchy protein paste, but the press of cold metal all around them begged for something hot in their bellies. They decided to give up one of the precious few ration packs they had left. Completing the steps blind was a long-honed skill. They knocked their knuckles together in the dark to establish their distance from each other. Phasma arranged a packet of pleesh soup in a duraplast sleeve alongside an exothermic heater, for Hux to top up with water. She held it away from their faces as soon as he finished, the chemical heater activating and boiling the water on contact. A sour chemical tang filled the air. It was against FO regulations to activate a rations pack in such close quarters; she held it against the mesh door, careful not to burn herself as steam poured off the box. There was only enough for a few slurps each, but the specifically designed calorie-dense slurry warmed them from the inside out. The recipe hadn’t changed since they were children. In the familiar dark, the hum of a shuttle at lightspeed it was as if their lives hadn’t changed at all. Clustered over Ren’s limp body, they dozed.

 

The ship wobbled with the drop from lightspeed. Faint green strip lights glowed to life along the length of the cabin, and boots clattered against the grating as Ince Raoda made his way back. Phasma stilled, a predator who’d heard rustling in the underbrush. Hux hooked a thumb in his broad waistband, brushing the edge of the vibroblade hidden in its folds. Ince Raoda sighed apologetically when he saw their alert faces, and waved the comm dangling from his hand, crackling away with landing radio traffic.  
“First Order is in the port.”   
“They’ve seized the planet? I thought the Hutt’s still controlled this sector.”  
“True. They come sometime for fuel, food, but lately they bring troopers and take what they like.” He appeared genuinely cross to have to alter their deal. “You paid, we agreed I take you to city.” He scrubbed a hand through his thinning hair. “But I let you go to city, you tell them I’m here, get paid, they seize part of cargo, call it taxes. Hutt is furious. You stay with me in labyrinth, come to the city when they go.”

The labyrinth, hidden amongst locals in a dilapidated shantytown until the Order passed. They did their level best not to look too relieved. “As you say,” said Hux. “We’ll remain in the labyrinth until they depart.”

The so-called labyrinth was a natural maze of scrubby marshland protruding from the coast. Protected by a sandbar, thick networks of reeds and roots grew over brackish water. The area was flat and open, but the ‘ground’ was too soft to land a ship. Many tried. Even the lightest vessels sank irretrievable into the muck. In due course plants found purchase on the wrecks and enveloped them entirely. The labyrinth grew. 

Ince Raoda set the shuttle down on the narrow bank of sand across from the city. The landing ramp cut a gap in steaming fog. Dim figures approached, their footsteps hushed in sodden sand. Ince Raoda strolled down to meet them, clasping elbows and thumping backs with broad humanoid figures clad in slick rubber layers. Far to the right, the sky warmed with the first blush of morning. They left Ren on the dry floor of the shuttle to help secure the shuttle, racing against the dissipating mist to disguise the craft. 

“The weather won’t have protected us from radar.”

“No radar. Order is not here to stay, they don’t monitor traffic. Lazy, like Lyrosila traps - you have these?”

Hux vaguely recalled an illustration on a datapad at the Academy, a desperate hand protruding from a seam in the fleshy emerald undergrowth where a hapless trooper had wandered over a carnivorous plant. “I know of them.”

“Order is like this. Eat what comes close. No chase.”

Hux was mentally composing the report before he could stop himself. Had discipline truly become so lax so quickly? But he hadn’t been in charge of this sector even prior to be deposed - the past four years had been consumed by his ambitious Starkiller project. General Domeed had administered the troops on the border of Hutt space and had always delivered promising reports of control and stability. A muscle twitched in Hux’s jaw. 

“We’ll need a doctor. Are there any medical provisions in the labyrinth?”

Ince Raoda was surprised, and obviously a little amused at this talk of doctors. Their skin was burnt and blistered, but Phasma’s bruises were on their way to fading and there was nothing left to do for seared skin down the side of Hux’s face but let it scar. The strap that held Ren on Phasma’s back chafed a thick welt over her shoulder. and another encircled her waist where they’d knotted a rope to distribute the weight. She alternated carrying sides sides each day in an attempt to spare her skin, but flecks of blood stained her shirt in a defined V over her breast bone. Like the villagers in Dal’Rassa, Ince Raoda had assumed that they carried the dead body of a lost comrade with them, perhaps taking it home to bury. Unlike the people of the cliff village, he sympathized with their efforts.

“One. Follow.” The collected Ren, and loaded him into the waterspeeder, before helping to push it out into the mist. Ince Raoda steered blindly through the dark water, closely skirting tracks of sand and the creeping tendrils of sea plants. Crude scrapmetal houses sat cockeyed on stilt poles. It was a relief to be out of the desert, but the water they skimmed over was warm and stagnant and ruddy with rust. No amount of standard field-issue water filters would make this lagoon potable. 

The doctor’s yurt sat low over the marsh. A squat mound of multicolored metal sheeting and drab fabrics. Ince Raoda ticked down the speeder engine to its lowest setting to coast them beneath the lumpen dwelling to where a durasteel ladder hung down. He rapped on the door over head with a pole, and gestured for them to climb the rungs up into the dark. The speeder hovered steady as they maneuvered Ren onto Phasma’s back. Ince Raoda shook each of their hands. “İyi şanslar,” he told them. “Travel well.” Phasma took his hand in return, pressed the back of it first to her cloth covered mouth, then to her forehead, in a ritual Hux had never seen. Ince Raoda shooed her away, smiling boyishly. Embarrassed, but clearly pleased.

 

The doctor was humanoid, but almost certainly not human, the jut of flat broad shoulders and perpetually crouched knees a little too sharp, spindly twitching fingers a little too long. He asked no questions, but watched avidly as they lay Ren out on the raised platform at the centre of the space and unzipped him from his confines. The scaly scabbing skin of his hands was either a trait native to his specious or some unsavory pathogen. Hux hoped it wasn’t contagious. Their was a box of gloves on the rolling tray beside the platform, and he hastily pulled on a pair.

“Oh, what a mess,” the doctor breathed, with no small amount of glee. The wide eyes barely visible between layers of ragged wrappings were hazy white-blue, their pupils fat and unfixed. He plucked up a brush and dabbed edges of Ren’s bandage to loosen it where it was stuck fast to the skin. Ointment mingled in the bloody crust that lined the ruined cloth. A trickle of dissolved blood gathered in the corner of Ren’s eye and tipped down his cheek, cutting a pale track through grime. The doctor went about his work with a low cheerful gurgle, reverently setting aside each cutaway swath of bandage as though he had some intention of pressing them in a scrapbook. 

“You see?” he said, tracing the outline of the traumatized flesh. Phasma nodded. He stiffened, swiveling his hooded head in her direction. “Come and see,” he snapped. She approached, gamely watching over his shoulder as he carried on, narrating his every step. His tone had softened immediately at her compliance, and he spoke in an eerie breathless ramble, encouraging and light as a crechemaster. He instructed her to ease down Ren’s jaw so his shaky hand could reach in and lay a dissolving tab on his tongue, a concoction to fight the infection. 

A tray of tools was fetched for him, and soon a blade weaved through the air, wielded by the doctor’s tremulous grip. Hux plucked the tool from his hands, thankful for the gloves that kept their skin from touching. “You will instruct me as necessary.” The doctor hesitated. “We’ll pay you the same. But you will not perform this procedure.” Crooning in disappointment, he stepped out of the way, making room for Hux at Ren’s bedside.

“Wait.” Hux dug out the last morsel of blakgum, a kernel no larger than the end of his finger, clinging to a folded square of waxy pressed leaf. He eased Ren’s mouth open and tucked it between his molars and cheek. “I don’t know how much he’s feeling any of this. But this will be the worst of it.” The blade handle was course with rust, and like everything else in the yurt, just faintly damp. He sterilized the shimmering sharp scalpel end a second time to his own satisfaction, and waved on the doctor to begin.

It was a grotesque ordeal. The doctor chirruped excitedly to himself, and leaned so close Hux imagined he could feel his clammy breath on the back of his hands. The discolored necrotic skin gave easily under his cuts. Hux breathed into his shoulder as he worked, until Ren’s face ran wet with fluids.

When he finished, Hux sat back, holding his messy hands aloft in front of himself. “Where’s the debriding ointment?” The doctor hacked a laugh into his shoulder and Phasma looked downright pitying. 

“What do they use down here then?” Hux snapped, impatient.

Phasma shifted her weight. “Are there any Flyworms?”

The doctor nodded, bobbing his chin against his chest in rapid jerks. “I can help you there.”  
He scuttled to the edge of the yurt, feeling his way over the shelf that lined the wall. He drew back a cloth, revealing a terrarium of writhing white larvae.

“And just what am I meant to do with these?!” Hux pictured corpses, swollen and melting with the sun, the surface of their skins shifting with a million teeming insects. What good would setting up an infestation do? Hux had not been raised in luxury, but moving from star destroyer to base to ship, it had been a relatively sterile existence. Backwoods remedies were not in his wheelhouse. If they’d had the medicine they had it, if they didn’t, they didn’t, that’s all there was to it. Some died, some survived, but no one was resorting to mashing up bark or stewing blessed leaves on The Insurrector.

“It’s alright, Sir,” Phasma said. “They only eat the dead flesh, and their secretions kill bacteria. Honestly, they use them all over the place in the Outer Rim.”

Phasma held a clean scrap of muslin for the doctor to shovel cupfulls of moist wriggling white mass. Hux watched for a moment, as they gently cupped the writhing fabric over the gash, carefully taping the edges in place to keep the larvae from escaping. Phasma looked like she had it well in hand, so Hux stepped outside for some air and to be sick into the water. He stood awhile on a raft moored to the yurt’s legs, weighing the discomfort of the sulfurous swamp air and the stuffy rank apartment above. Eventually the gnats clustering at his eyes and the seam of his mouth chased him back inside.

Ren was all taped up, but the cloth over this face trembled slightly, making it impossible to forget what was tucked underneath. Hux looked away “Will this take long?”

Phasma snapped off her slimy gloves. “Best to leave them a day or two.”

Hux shivered, startled when he realized that Ren’s whole eye was now open. He was awake, or as awake as he got these days. Maker.


	3. Chapter 3

The First Order left the port at first light in a great synchronized rap-tapping of trooper armor over hard packed ground.  The city took a deep breath, shaking off the distrustful quiet. They flagged down a boatman who brought them to shore, and took lodgings over a butcher shop that kept its own poultry, loud at all hours of the day and night.  A nook, really, in a long open room, banked off with duraplast sheets which hung from a grid of ropes on the ceiling. The owner’s son showed them to a corner space, the last one available.  Though the window was sealed poorly and there was no shielding them from the city’s cacophony, having two enclosed walls provided a more defensible position, and they were glad for it.

 

Phasma procured them loose salwar that bound tight at the ankles and broad cloth belts the sat high on the waist.  Paired with Order regulation boots the overall effect was far from stylish, but they fit in well with the jumbled catch-as-catch-can culture of the port. Many of the laborers forwent shirts, but their skin couldn’t abide it yet, and their clothes were soon thin from washing.

 

Even in a squalorous outpost such as this, skilled labor was guild labor.  Providing even the most rudimentary repairs without their go-ahead would be inviting a world of trouble. Hux left Phasma to look after Ren in the shade, and went out in search.  

 

Finding the resident guild head was easy enough, kicked back under a grimy awning overlooking the landing fields.  It would take some convincing to negotiate a position in his ranks, given that despite his skill, Hux wore no guild mark.  Typically, apprentices won their guild marks after the completion of masterworks, or where time and supplies were too short of individual projects, service to a master for an allotted period.  Hux’s masterwork would go down in infamy as the greatest engineering marvel of its age, but it meant nothing the to the mechanics under this filthy tent, on a nameless Rim hovel, sipping tepid beer and swatting at flies.

 

He could tell them he was a mechanical technician trained in the Order - it was well known that the Order didn’t allow its technicians to join guilds, for fear that they’d be encouraged to seek outside commissions, or be tempted by an immediate route of employment available to them outside of the Order, but any association that might draw attention would be unwise.  He would have to play the country bumpkin then, confined for most of his life to an isolating planet with no foothold for interplanetary guilds.  Nes-Ket would do nicely. Embroiled in civil war for nearly a century now, too much of a hassle for any external power to deal with, and openly hostile to off-worlders.  

 

He was directed to a wiry middle-aged man with scars over his scalp, who introduced himself as Jol Yen-Rryt, and the head of the local chapter.  He was brown as a nut, but the comically sharp tanlines left around his eyes from goggles suggested it was a product of environment, and not birth.  After some deliberation with his fellows, and jovial commentary on the unfortunateness of Hux’s physical appearance, they offered to test him into their ranks.  The twinkle in his eye promised that he was more interested in the entertainment of Hux’s failure than finding a valuable new addition for the team, but Hux had excelled under worse conditions.

 

The pod engine they placed before him was elaborately modified with ad hoc parts. Laughter rippled through the mechanics - clearly they anticipated such an unorthodox construction would be entirely alien to a military mechanic with consistent access to regulation parts, a reasonable assumption of a soldier from Nes-Ket.  Hux considered a bit of posturing, perhaps even laying a bet on his success, but bruising egos now could spell danger for them later on.  They couldn’t afford bad blood with the locals. He set to work.

 

His nails caught something tacky tucked inside the casing. Explosive putty, primed to detonate when the power was activated and the device generated enough heat.  Judging by the quantity, no more than to startle him, possibly take a few fingers if he wasn’t fast enough.  Hux selected a blade from the tool bench and carefully scraped it away, unfazed.

 

After he passed their first obstacle the laughter petered off, and they watched with interest as he deftly revived the engine.  And the next one they put in front of him.  And the next.  By the end of the afternoon, they were ready to offer him cut the guild’s mark into him, and call him one of their own.

 

This wasn’t a technician’s haircut he could grow out in the right company; short of a deliberate flaying followed by a skin-graft, this mark would linger.  Hux took a deep breath, held it, let it out.  Securing a livelihood was paramount while Ren convalesced insensate, and they determined their next move.

 

Applications varied across planets and species, bright white freeze brands being preferred by harrier beings, and glowing inks popular amongst the semi-aquatic, but the symbol remained the same, a stylized gear with seven teeth.  The population of this port was heavy on thick-hided aliens, even a few red-skinned Zeltrons, and featured the full range of human tone; Hux suspected raised scars were the norm here for their superior visibility on textured dark skin.

 

Jol pulled his left forearm over the bench.  Hux shook him off.  “It’ll have to be the other side.”

 

Jol sucked his teeth. “Guild sigils are always on the left side.”

 

“Then it will have to go further up.”  Hux rapped his knuckles sharply on his forearm so Jol could hear the tap of metal beneath synthskin.  Jol shrugged agreeably and beckoned him around the table so he could reach his bicep.  The synthskin could take ink, but it would be a temporary measure without a true dermis to hold it in place, and scarification would be a nonstarter. Jol wiped a handless blade against his trouser leg before he began.  Far from clean then, but utterly sharp, and the first few cuts felt of nothing at all.  Hux breathed slowly and deeply, sinking into the sharp scratching sensation until the adrenaline buoyed him over it.  Blood trickled, tacky and hot, into his elbow hollow.  

 

Jol sat back, satisfied with his work, though Hux could hardly make out the pattern under the slick of fresh blood. Jol rummaged in a drawer for a tin cannister and smeared ashes over the cuts, ensuring that they would heal slow enough for the skin to ridge.  The slower the healing, the stronger the design.  Hux grit his teeth against the fresh flare of agony.  Jol wrapped it firmly in overlapping strips of off-white muslin to keep the gashes out of the open air. 

 

\---

 

The next evening, Phasma helped him ease away the crusty bandages and reapply fresh ones, tight around the edges but loose over the wound itself.  It was a tenuous compromise, helping the cuts dry out to avoid infection, but always keeping it covered, lest the flies flock to it.  Resuming a life of manual labor was punishing enough without a festering sore.

 

A rare afternoon downpour had left the city pleasantly mild for once, and they treated themselves to hot food from the shop below, fried roots and savory pastries, and shared on the bench outside.  They watched the tempo of the city ramp up as night fell, as its inhabitants shook off the languor of the sweltering day and set out to have their fun.  Spice runners manned their street corners, bar signs lit up, and the city chatted loudly over the pleading and cursing of whichever fool had reneged on his debts to the Hutt the night before, or failed to make a clean getaway on a scam, dragged through the dusty streets to meet their comeuppance.

Hux had known few opportunities to walk amongst the myriad species of the galaxy, and he listened attentively as Phasma described each one that walked past. A line of willowy lime-tinted beings swayed by them, bedecked in strange finery. Stubby black rings of bone circled their necks.  They wore between them collars of hammered metal adornments, too fine to be restraints, and with no apparent place to attach a chain.  The didn’t look very comfortable.  They walked with their heads high, but Hux considered that if they were the property of the Hutt himself, this might bestow upon them some a certain stranding and protection.  “Are the Hutts so powerful that they contain their possessions with mere jewelry?”

 

Phasma looked to where he was motioning with a subtle tip of his head. “They’re no slaves.” she said.  “Most likely weapons dealers, from Hreesh.  Dark ridges are a mark of high breeding amongst the Hreesheesh.  They cover adjacent skin when they travel - the paler the skin, the darker the bone by contrast.”  She carefully picked a fly out of her sludgy caff.  “They find it beautiful.”

 

“Whyever would they?  Something so arbitrary?”

 

Phasma did him the courtesy of not laughing outright, but her eyes were creased with amusement.  “I couldn’t tell you.  I only know as much about them as I needed to seek out information, pinpoint their leaders and loyalties.  If you’d like to discuss with someone the philosophy of beauty, Hreesheesh or otherwise, you’ll have to wait until Master Ren wakes up.”

 

\---

 

There was no easy rest to be found by Ren’s side.  By some byproduct of his distant state, a diminished control over the Force or simply proximity, Hux and Phasma were nightly swept under with him.  Most often they experienced his dreams at a distance, trapped in a cool misty chamber with no Ren in sight, only the sounds of distant battles and wailing echoing through the halls.

 

The first few times, they experienced them as though through a fog, incorporeal and faint, but soon voices and faces grew vivid.  

 

And always the boy.  In reality, the voice was no doubt contained in the boy’s mind, but here in this dreamscape the whispers rang out from all around them.

 

A shifting faceless presence that found him in dreams, that slithered underfoot, cool and damp, like eels writhing beneath the carpet.  When he ran from the others, it pulled in close, a dark misty mantle around him that hid the boy from sight.  _ but he’d wanted to be found, little boys who run away do it to prove to themselves that someone will find them, someone will come for them. _ If Uncle Luke was as great of a Jedi as they said, it shouldn’t have mattered, nothing would have kept him away if he’d truly wanted to find the boy.  _ He had chosen not to _ , it was certain, and the mantle sank heavier on the boy’s pale bony shoulders. 

 

\---

 

Day labor was easy to come by in the port, hauling cargo off transports and packing salt for off-world export.  Hux came to an accord with the mechanics outpost, carrying out small repair jobs.  By silent agreement, he and Phasma took shifts keeping an eye on Ren, to see to it that he rested undisturbed.  At the end of the day, whoever had gone out to work brought back food, and lay down in the shade to drink lukewarm water until their stomach hurt too much to continue.  Ren had begun to move occasionally, his eyelids twitching, and he might wake up at any moment.  Even unconscious, he appeared distressed when they were gone too long, thrashing in the covers until they were knotted about his legs.

 

“We could sleep with him between us.  Keep him hemmed in.  It could ground him when he gets disoriented.”  Hux glanced up from the lump between them.  “Does that make sense?”

 

“Sounds like laying down to sleep with a grenade in your pocket,” Phasma said, but she shrugged and didn’t hesitate to arrange the bedding to her liking and settle in for the night.  “It’s like tauntauns.”

 

Hux blinked muzzily at the heap of limbs and fabric that was blocking his view of her face.  The resemblance wasn’t obvious. “Is it?”

 

“A light touch makes them nervous, Sir.” She propped herself up to meet his eye over Ren’s back.  “They buck the tentative.”

 

“You’re saying we should use a firm hand?”

 

“I don’t mean slap him about.”  She settled down onto her side and confidently wrapped an arm over Ren’s shoulders, tucking him in close.  “A firm hand.”

 

“I’m not sure we should task ourselves with treating his latent issues around contact deprivation.”

 

“Very good, Sir.  Let me know when you’ve arrived at a superior idea.”   _ Sir _ was fast becoming a marker of sarcasm.  Still, she  _ was _ more experienced in these matters.  Hux rested a tentative hand on Ren’s opposite hip.  

 

\---

 

Sharp gusts of autumn hustled them up the hillside, past the treeline.  In Ren’s dream, the world was a monochrome palette of blues fading into greys, the coming sun lurking like a premonition beneath the horizon.  Phasma and Hux trailed behind the crowd.  This dream felt closer than the last, tangible. Dewy grass soaked through the hems of their trousers.  

 

The boy sat on the shoulders of a scruffy man touched with the first threads of gray.  He huddled close about his neck like a woeful scarf, rubbing his little fists against his eyes - he’d been woken just to come here.

 

They walked up the summit to watch the pilots take off.  Solo sighed wistfully.  The boy’s eyes never left his father’s face.  He’d said he was going to stick around for awhile, but his days here were numbered.  The boy’s tremulous little misery screamed from every inch of his face. Solo patted his knee, his attention hardly straying from the sky. “Cheer up sport, Uncle Chewie will be back soon.” He picked up the boy’s hand to wave goodbye to the ship disappearing through the cloud layer.  The boy swallowed over sobs, his hand limp in his father’s grasp. He appeared to be on the verge of being sick.

 

The contents of the child’s mind sang out on the wind, helpless to the Force that flowed through him, his mind no longer a sanctuary.   _ Were we not enough to stay for?  If he truly loved us, would it not be enough to keep him here? _

 

\---

 

Hux awoke to find Ren propped onto one elbow, staring at him.  The muscle tremored there, and he wobbled, the limb nearly giving out from under him.  Hux watch sour determination chase realization across his face. Ren pointedly held his position even as his whole arm began to shake with the strain.  The strip of fabric that they’d tied over the empty socket of his right eye had left his hair a matted mess.

 

“How long?” he rasped.

 

“A few weeks.”

 

“You look older than I remember.”

 

Hux rolled his eyes and stood up to get ready for the day. He hadn’t missed Ren’s conversational prowess.  “It’s called a beard, you utter simpleton.”  Ren’s hand drifted up to pick and scratch at the corner of his new scar.  Hux noticed blood dried in his nail beds, as if he’d been doing it in his sleep as well.  “We went through great trouble to get that seen to,” he told him, before bending down to lace up his boots.

 

Ren didn’t answer, just watched him, puzzled.  “Your voice.  What’s wrong with it?”

 

Hux halted his movements, aggrieved. “I know it doesn’t come naturally to you, but we need to make some effort to blend in.”

 

Ren tipped his head to the conversations carrying on on the other side of their tarps. “You don’t sound like the people here.”

 

“I’d sound like a lisping nerf-herder if I tried.  It’s not about geography. It’s about strata.”  Ren blinked at him.  “This is what the working class sound like, where I’m from.  How my mother spoke as a child. Outside formal settings.  It’s not Imperial or Republic, that’s what matters.  These are tumultuous times.”  It must be a rude awakening, coming back to the world here without any knowledge of anything after the bloodied snows of Starkiller, but Hux didn’t have time to linger.  “Phasma will be up soon, she’ll get you something to eat.”  

 

Ren grabbed his wrist, holding him in place.  “You can’t go out there.  They’ll recognize your face,” he said, as if it had just occurred to him. Hux contemplated a world in which Kylo had crashed alone.  Perhaps the Force would have kept him alive long enough to self-destruct in characteristically cataclysmic fashion, taking half the galaxy with him.

 

“You haven’t had a chance to see many First Order broadcasts.”  There was little danger of lingering focus on his face.  The ethos of the Order was mutual effort for a common goal.  The camera angles would be broad shots, impressing the viewer with wide angles of their magnificent weapons, the sweeping lines of the battlements, their diligent troops gleaming in the flickering death throes of a dying sun.  His speech would have rung out over all of his.  His name was bound in glory and infamy with the Starkiller, but while the Resistance no doubt had dossiers on him, to civilian in the street he was nearly as anonymous as Phasma or Kylo Ren. Filthy tired, beard growth ragged and interrupted by the narrow streaks of his shuttle burns, he hardly cut the figure of a general these days. “I’ve been going out there for weeks.  There’s work to be done.”

 

\---

 

The boy was taller, and wore a single long braid behind one ear.  He wrestled with an older blond man.  Training of some kind, they gathered - the man didn’t appear to be trying to hurt the boy.  The boy was pinned quickly.  The man held him in place and spoke in low even tones, trying to talk him through getting free.  “Think now, how can you gain leverage?”  Trapped, the boy was too upset, panicked or embarrassed, to hear the man’s advice, and he thrashed wildly, inadvertently hurting himself on the stony ground where they tumbled.  The laugh that followed wasn’t malicious, was positively avuncular, but the boy growled back.  He abandoned etiquette, trying to throw an elbow into his opponent’s gut, anything to dislodge him.  Calloused hands caught the movement.  The teacher flipped them so that he lay on his back, winding his legs around his torso and trapped his hands. 

 

Children of varying age and species looked on, ostensibly learning from the demonstration.  Their half-remembered faces moved sluggishly in the edges of this dreamscape, most of them frozen in a rictus of cruelty such as only children are capable.

 

Loose stones whipped through the air, catching one of the other padawans across the brow.  “Calm yourself Ben,” the teacher commanded, further immobilizing his flailing body.  The hold wasn’t designed to place undue pressure on the lungs or throat, but the boy gasped desperately for air.  He turned in Phasma and Hux’s direction, but saw right through them.  Either they were unreal on this plane, or panic had blinded him entirely.

 

Hux felt Phasma stirring beside him, beginning to wade through the mist. He caught her elbow.  “This isn’t real.  It’s in the past.  There’s no changing it.”

 

“True enough, Sir. But tell me you wouldn’t dearly love to hit someone right now.”

 

Hux didn’t require further encouragement.  The mist burnt back as they advanced, colors and sounds growing sharper.  He delivered sharp kicks to the teacher’s kidney until he released the boy, turning to them with shock and confusion.  Phasma hauled the man up to his feet by the back of his robes and swiftly caught his arms up in a hold behind his head.  The laughing children fell silent, and evaporated into the murky edges of the vision.  If this was indeed a Jedi training camp, and the man caught between them Skywalker, this confrontation would have gone very differently, but in the logic of the dream, he was dwarfed by Phasma and Hux, and the pointed mystic motions of his hands, the solemn invocations under his breath, yielded no succor.  

 

Hux drew to mind the frustrations and disappointments of the past month and took every last one out on the man’s face.  The culmination of his masterwork undermined by the badly mishandled Skywalker expedition, Colonel Tarkin commanding from the bridge of the Finalizer, Snoke’s casual dismissal of the Order’s future to pursue his own ends, the tickle of greasy unwaxed hair falling into his eyes; it rained down on this drab-robed sun-weathered wretch. When he was dead weight in Phasma’s arms and had no strength left to remain on his feet, he crumpled, bloodied, to the earth between them.

 

The boy lay on his back still, watching them with wide eyes.  Blood trickled over his chin from a nick on his cheek incurred from struggling over the stones.  As they stepped towards him, tendrils emerged from the tall grass and crept along the earth, weaving about his feet to bind the boy in place.  Mottled green, they left a trail of dark stain on the ground, shriveling the grass.  Hux and Phasma couldn’t know if they could be truly hurt here, but whatever had drawn them to this place, the Force was involved, and Hux had never known it to be a benign power.  Hux felt a new weight on his belt and pulled his blaster without a second thought.  He shot a ring about them, and as close to the boy as dared, and darted forward to pull him to his feet. Though the tendrils flinched from the blasts they appeared undamaged, and encroaching slowly but undeterred.  Phasma scooped the boy onto her hip and ran for the bare hillock at the end of the training field.  Hux followed close behind, laying covering fire.

 

The sky parted, and the oncoming force seared at the edges, slowing its approach.  The tendrils were wrinkling back, shriveling under the increased light.  Baffled, Hux looked up to find its source.  The boy was still in Phasma’s arms, but with one hand outstretched towards the menacing tentacles, brow drawn tight in concentration, forcing them back until they disappeared like the foolish teacher and the laughing children.  Phasma whooped and threw up her free arm.  “And it’s the 6-year-old with the assist!”

 

Hux laughed in relief.  “Well done.”  It felt like being back at the Academy, the short-lived high of camaraderie in a well-executed simulation.  The boy’s expression brightened, blushing and wide-eyed under their attentions.

 

When Hux woke, Ren was watching him.  Between one blink and the next Ren slumped, eyes shut again, by all appearances dead to the world.  Hux huffed under his breath.  There was no harm in letting Ren feign sleep.  In the faint blue light that filtered through the curtains, Hux’s eyes caught a small scar to the left of his mouth, and recalled where the boy had bled.  He stuck his hand in his pocket before he could do something foolish like brush it gently with his thumb.  Ren’s hand was on his fresh scar again, and Hux barely resisted the desire to slap it away.  “You must tell me what I can do to make you stop doing that.”

 

“Itches,” he mumbled.

 

“We have a razor in the medkit.”  Hux hadn’t bothered to shave, eager to appear as unlike his former self as possible, but it wouldn’t matter in Ren’s case.  He fetched it out and handed it to Ren, who took it uncertainly.   He was right-handed, and his right shoulder had borne the worst of his sabre burns, its muscles jumping in fatigue at every task that required control.  Ren’s hands shook until he curled them into fists.

 

“I’ll do it later,” he announced loudly, and stowed the razor back in their paltry crate of possessions.

 

When Hux came back from the airfield that night, Ren’s short beard was gone, and Phasma was wiping soap from his neck with efficient swipes.  The rich waves of his hair just brushed his shoulders, freshly trimmed.  Ren stared determinedly into the middle distance, committed to pretending that this wasn’t happening.  His teeth were lodged in his lower lip, containing some emotion. It was the first time he’d been awake to experience their tending touches.  Hux about-faced to fetch cooking water from the pump, positive that this required no audience.

 

\---

 

Days came intermittently when Ren was caught in a swell of energy, scrubbing himself viciously pink in the tepid pumpwater until Phasma intervened, hurling himself into katas in the aisle between the hanging tarps.  He hadn’t used the Force since he’d awoken, but the air around him crackled, heavy with potential.  The hall was baking hot in the height of the day, and emptied considerably.  The other residents lay quiet in the afternoon.  The few that remained slept deeply in the wake of night shifts, or stared unseeing at the fall of light through the colorful sheeting, lost in a rapturous daze on spice or blakgum.  

 

Hux made his first attempt at manual laundry, scrunched their curtains down the cord to make space for what few articles of clothing they had and hanging them with the greatest surface area possible. Stripped down to his shorts, he sank down to sit on the cool tiles.  He watched Ren cycle through his katas, and other times stand absolutely still, frozen halfway through a strike or bow, head tilted as if listening to a far distant call.  The tender starburst of red scartissue at his hip was sinister dark in the halflight, stark and alien against a torso that was otherwise fishbelly pale.  Ren never spoke about what he saw inside his own mind.

 

The afternoon before, Jol had just been sealing the thin paper of a smokestick in place with the edge of a nail when the furious clamor of a customer called him away.  One foot still on the bench, Jol had turned back and tossed the cig to Hux.  “You come out in 5 minutes and tell me something in the shop’s on fire, I’m gonna need an out.”

 

The smokestick had been wrapped in cheap flavored paper striped with faint red lines, meant to taste of some sour stone fruit.  Hux had never tried it, but the tang of it was marginally preferable to the flat pulpy flavor of the thicker plain paper.

 

Hux checked his pocket now. The smokestick remained, crumpled slightly, loose tabacc spilling from the open end.  Second Engineer assigned to the  _ Insurrector _ had perpetually held a roughrolled smokestick tucked behind his right ear.  He tended to forget about them until they fell apart, and was often seen in the back of meetings, picking loose leaves out of his beard contemplatively.  Ren looked entirely absorbed in the routine he’d set for himself.  Hux decided he wouldn’t be gone long.  These cheap smokesticks burned down like nothing, and he’d sit on the bench by the stoop, so he’d know if anyone came in or out.  He just needed some fresh air.

 

\---

 

Hux strolled back through the butcher shop, past counters lined with tubs, heaped high with assorted organs, set aside for grinding. Plump and pink, they glimmered wetly in the low light.   He hauled himself up with stairs, but stopped short when he heard from above unmistakable half-shouts and grunts of pain. Hux sprinted up the stairs cursing himself, and paused before the door, silently hefting a steel bar that leaned against the wall. He spun around the corner, only to find Ren still alone in the loft.  Ren held a taut plank position, slowly rising and falling, moving from his hands to his elbows and back. Sweat poured down his back, slickened his grip on the floor. His powerful shouldered quaked, the weak right side dipping out of alignment. His trembling face bloomed with the blotchy red of exertion and impotent fury at his own body.  Tears trickled down the end of his nose. Pained gasps caught in his throat. “Get out.” 

 

Hux lowered his weapon and came a little closer.  “I should like to see you try and make me in this state.”  Ren’s knuckles were bloody, and Hux wondered what move he’d tried before this one.  “Is this your plan then? To finish what he started?”  Ren screamed again, a guttural wordless thing, but refused to drop.  “Perhaps wait until Phasma returns, to thank her for all she’s done.  She’ll have to carry you one last time, after all, if we have to dispose of your body.”  Ren’s sweaty palms slipped out from under him, and he bared his teeth at Hux, daring him to comment.

 

Hux tried a new tack.  “I’ll train with you.  Let me show you how to ease into it.”

 

“You think I need advice from  _ you _ ?”

 

Hux squatted down so they were eye-level.  “If you know how to do it properly, you’re choosing not to.  For whatever motives compel it, the Force chose to save you.”  In his more melodramatic moments, Hux had to imagine it was simply to torture him still further.

 

“How do you know? You know nothing of the Force.”

 

“Frankly Ren, nothing and noone else would.”

 

“You’re sure I didn’t save myself?”

 

Hux nodded pointedly at the state of his body.  The skin around his bandages was raw from his punishing scrubbing routine, his limbs swollen and bruised from slipping to the floor when he couldn’t hold his training stances. “You don’t seem so inclined.”

 

“You’re sure it wasn’t the Supreme Leader?” Ren asked, softer.

 

“To what end?”  Hux narrowed his eyes.  “Has he spoken to you?”  Ren sat back and wiped the sweat from his chest with a freshly laundered shirt.  Hux snatched it away. “You spoke once, on Dal’Rassa.  You said ‘He’s gone’.”

 

“I don’t remember.”  Hux suspected Ren did remember them finding him in sleep, but he seemed desperate to ignore it.  

 

“Was that not him?  There, in your mind?” It was the closest any of them had come to acknowledging what Hux and Phasma had witnessed, but if Snoke still dogged their steps it was worth inciting whatever defensive rage Ren might spin into.  

 

Ren didn’t lash out, only folded in further on himself.  “Only an echo, in the spaces he left behind.”

 

“Unless this was his intention?  He knew the Force would keep you whole?” Hux wondered aloud.  His gaze was distant, retroengineering potential strategies that might have led them here. It would be easier if they had access to First Order publications and knew how the High Command was spinning recent events, but the Order had no hold here and seeking it out would only draw attention.  “The whole galaxy believes he’s forsaken you, possibly even killed you, leaving you free to defect to the Resistance and destroy them from the inside.”  Ren sat on his heels, confirming nothing.  He watched Hux pop to his feet and begin to pace the small space. “The Supreme Leader Snoke would have laid down orders if he anticipated my survival.  So he didn’t plan for that, or didn’t care either way.  Or-”  Hux rounded on Ren. “Or he intended for you to kill us when we’d fulfilled our usefulness.”

 

“Something you might do, if you were Emperor?”

 

“It’s a perfectly sound strategy, if you trust your disavowed agent to survive and get the job done.”

 

“It’s good.  Smart. Ruthless.”

 

“Ren?”

 

He grunted.  “Snoke has no more plans for me.”  He stared up at Hux his big wet eyes.  “But I know he has done this for a reason.”

 

Hux scowled, disgusted with Ren’s persistent faith.  “I’ve never associated Force users with leadership prowess.  If Snoke had succeeded, he would have been an exception.”

 

“Darth Vader was an unparalleled warrior.  The Empire’s legions thrived under his command.”

 

“The military arm of the Empire promoted its most capable officers - and when they failed Vader, or happened to be proximate when someone else did, he throttled them to their death, and then another officer, who had not been deemed sufficiently capable to hold the same rank, stepped into their abandoned place.  Hardly a meritocracy.”  Hux had dedicated great time and attention to ensuring his subordinates could thrive in the event of his capture or death.  At least at one time, he had thought he had succeeded in walking that fine line between delegation and indispensability.  But run down, sun scorched and hungry, and feeling distinctly petty, it pleased him to imagine that the  _ Finalizer _ , and by extension the whole of the Order, flailed without their Command Triumvirate in place, that the officers squabbled for titles while desperately avoiding the helm, lest it place them directly in Snoke’s line of fire.

 

Ren picked morosely at his bloody knuckles.  Hux cringed.  He had no training to tend to the distraught.  “Then you have no plans to flee penitent to your mother’s arms?”

 

Ren pressed a nail into the cuts until they bled freely.  “No.”

 

“Right,” said Hux, glad they wouldn’t have to linger on the topic.  “For the best.  Whatever her flaws, I’ve always thought High Command overestimated her sentimentality.  It wouldn’t be a smooth infiltration.  Or a comfortable refuge.”  

 

Ren smiled faintly.  “No,” he agreed. Organa hadn’t appeared in the dreams Hux and Phasma had been party to, leaving Ren’s precise feelings about her still very much a mystery.  Hux left it alone.  “None of those things.  Snoke is gone from me.  I felt him leave.  When Grandfather’s lightsaber chose another.”

 

“The scavenger?”  Ren flinched.  In a vicious burst of motion he punched his bowcaster scar several times in rapid succession. Hux watched impassively, waiting it out before pressing on.  “The lightsaber chose her? Is that empty rhetoric, or do they have a will?”  Hux had read the works of Darth Sidious. They spoke of the Force as though it had a will of its own, desires. Plans.

 

Ren shifted uncomfortably.  He hadn’t had cause to discuss the Force with the uninitiated since he was a boy, and whatever his ambitions, he’d rarely been entrusted with the role of teacher. “It is possible to wield another’s saber, or for someone who is not one with the Force to do it, but kyber crystals chose their Masters.”

 

“What does it mean then, that yours is broken?”

 

“I don’t know,” he snapped.  His long bare toes curled against the floor, his body taut with despair.  “I wasn’t taught for this moment.”

 

“Maybe you’re not the same person you were, when the crystal first chose you.”

 

“My own weapon does not choose me.  Darth Vader’s weapon. My birthright.  Does not choose me.”  He rubbed a rough hand over his cheek where the scar was thickest, chasing the pain.  “My final failure.”

 

“Cheer up Ren,” called Phasma, coming down the hall, “You’re young yet, you’ve untold years of failing ahead of you.” While Phasma had never been particularly obsequious, carrying Ren had stripped her of any lingering deference.

 

“She’s right.  We live to die another day.”  The day workers were beginning to trickle back into the loft, so Hux led Ren back to their nook and sat down across from him.  “You need to stretch if you’re going to push yourself like that.  More than you’re used to, if you want to regain your range of motion.  Watch me.  I ought to do it anyway, I’ve been neglecting them.”  Much to his surprise, Ren did just as he asked.  

 

They stretched side by side in silence for nearly an hour, transitioning slowly into muscles control exercises. Hux made sure to push Ren’s limits now and again, to discourage him taking it upon himself to punish his body as he saw fit.  By the time they finished, Phasma was half-asleep watching them, a cool damp cloth tucked around her neck.  Ren raised a hand to his cheek to scratch, automatic.

 

“Will you let me help you shave?”

 

Ren squirmed, a complicated movement of shoulders, chin, and hands.  Hux chose to interpret it as a nod.  He went to fetch the razor.  The burn had damaged the follicles surrounding the wound, so Hux didn’t have to get too close to the line of skin that was still stitching itself together.  His breath was unsteady but he sat perfectly still.  Considering Ren’s intermittent shyness, Hux hadn’t expected for him to stare straight at him while he did this.  He refused to be unnerved, and kept his touch firm and confident, recalling Phasma’s advice about the handling of skittish animals.

Phasma ran a hand over her grown-out buzzcut and watched the razor enviously.  Hux waved it at her.  “I could get you while I’m at it?” Making this a communal experience might settle Ren some.

 

“I wish,” she grumbled, “I look like a bottlebrush.”  It was true that her thick straight hair was caught in an unfortunate midpoint, sticking right up from her scalp.  “Better not though.”  The cut was popular far beyond trooper ranks, but the more they could distance the association in observers’ minds, the safer they would be.

 

It was easier, in a way, those days when Ren’s blood was up.  They were tasked with containing him, keeping him from drawing attention to them or aggravating his wounds, but he wore his moods plain on his face and they could brace themselves for imminent impact.  They’d know precisely when something went wrong.  Other days, Ren was caught in an eerie stupor, half-awake and still, never leaving the pile of bedding.  His quieter moods were more insidious.  Long stretches of sullen inactivity would be shattered in an instant.  He lashed out at them, the walls, whatever came closest to hand, but the only thing he seemed invested in hurting was himself.

 

He responded to questions only with noises, if at all, and he settled his gaze somewhere over their shoulders.  With no distractions to hand, these were the worst days for his minders as well, never sure enough to leave him alone for long, even when he appeared dead to the world.

Hux sat and watched the city from the window, picturing how he’d raize it to the ground and rebuild it.  The city’s edges unfolded in a vast organic sprawl, like mold breeding across a persistently damp wall. Utilities were overseen by a scanty collective of municipal workers employed by the Hutts, functioning on a complex web of corruption and bribery.  Hux could scour the whole place clean, set it to rights.  Once.  Once, he could have.

 

\---

 

Still adjusting to manual labor in the sun, Hux was, for the first time in his life, routinely the last to wake.  Today, Ren was up already, busily destroying something.  He had a cloth in his hands, and was tearing it into strips for hand-wrapping.  Hux wondered where he found it.  It was coarse woven muslin, just like… just like Phasma’s headscarf.  He sat up so fast his head swam. Ren noticed that he was awake, but carried on with what he was doing. Wind fluttered the tarps and a shard of light fell across his face, revealing none of the malicious glee Hux had anticipated.  He looked placid.  Tired.   Like any other man preparing for a morning workout.

 

“Stop that at once!”  

 

Ren glanced around, puzzled, and back down at his hands.  “What?”

 

Hux lowered his voice to a furious whisper, aware that it was early yet and uneager to draw the ire of their slumbering neighbours.  “I realize this will mean breaking the habit of a lifetime Ren, but you needn’t take or destroy everything you come across simply because you can.”

 

Ren’s face colored, and his voice rose in defensiveness. ”The General of an expansionist regime would lecture me on taking whatever I so choose?”

 

“Be quiet, you intemperate infant.” It was inconsequential, but Hux couldn’t help but respond to the personal jibe.  “You think I’m driven by conquest?  To own every Maker-forsaken moon and disease-ridden outpost in the galaxy?  I oversaw the relocation of the populace in the Wathetti system - toxic atmosphere, scant natural resources, what could I have had to gain?”

 

“Children.  Children to feed an army.”

 

“Irradiated children!  Children who would have died toiling in the sun, malnourished and always last on a senate committee’s to-do list, perhaps to be discussed after they break for lunch, or perhaps in a fortnight when the swoop racing’s not on, or perhaps never at all!”

 

The tarps crinkled as they parted, and Phasma, hair still wet from the fresher, stared down at the mess in Ren’s lap.  When Phasma snatched the remainder of the scarf out of his hands, he looked only surprised, and a little confused.  She fingered the trailing threads of the abused fabric.  “Were you of a mind to spar, Master Ren?”  She sounded every inch a Stormtrooper Captain, cold and implacable.

 

Hux winced as Ren nodded easily and followed her out to the open floor, still ignorant of his transgression.  “Try not to reopen his stitches.”  Phasma nodded, and pulled some strips from the pile to wrap her own hands.  Hux busied himself preparing for his shift.  Phasma was as good as her word, though by the time Hux left for the guild station Ren could no longer suppress his limp, and his one remaining eye was blackening rapidly. 

\---

Hux opened his eyes and immediately threw out an arm to steady himself. The mossy stone where he sat was slick and cool, and he’d nearly rolled straight into the water.  His seat protruded from a wide slow-moving river that moseyed through a valley toward a far break in the trees, where a steep incline threw the water down over winding rapids.  The sun-dappled water ran clear, sparkling and bright.  Phasma sat across from him, similarly stripped down to regulation underclothes, shorts and tanks in a wicking navy material.  Her scarf draped graceful and loose around her shoulders, one corner trailing in the water.  It wasn’t the one she wore in waking life - it was finely woven in a deep blue material with a faint dappling of shade that suggested it was dyed by some luxurious natural means, lacking the severe uniformity of synthetic dyework.

They breathed deeply of the forest air, rejoicing in being cool and clean for the first time since Starkiller.  Starkly white little minnows darted between their feet, hovering in the current and nibbling ticklishly against their skin.  Phasma laughed delightedly, and swirled her toes in the water, watching fascinated as they followed unafraid.  “They feel so strange.  It’s rather scintillating”  She glanced up at Hux, and had the audacity to wink.  He scoffed at her, splashing her childishly when it only made her laugh harder.  Something crashed through the trees above them.  Phasma quickly snapped the scarf from her shoulders and knotted it over her hair.  She turned back to look out for the intruder, sloppily tucking the end of the scarf across her mouth.

 

Phasma’s stare caught on something over his shoulder, but her smile didn’t dim.  Slowly, Hux turned to look.  A ways up the bank, a boy verging on manhood awkwardly perched halfway out of the shrub he’d fallen into.  He bobbed behind a tree when he realized he’d been caught, and looked out as if he couldn’t quite decide if he wanted to commit to hiding from them.  He wore his hair close-cropped, save for a long dark braid that hung behind his overlarge ear, decorated in beads of yellow and red.  Hux scoffed again, at the absurdity of it all, the two of them here in his mind stripped down like sirens in the stream.

 

The boy clambered down closer, but shrank back from their smiles, hunched defensively against their stares.  He called out to them with timid authority. “You shouldn’t be here.”

 

“And why is that?  This is our river.”  Phasma spoke with unflappable confidence, and Hux watched doubt flicker across Ren’s face.  

 

“It is?”

 

“You can come share it awhile,” Hux offered.  “It’s hot today.”  As he said it, the air grew hotter still, as if Ren’s thoughts and desires permeated the very air of this place.

 

Ren looked longingly at the water but shook his head darting a glance back up to the treeline.   “I shouldn’t.  He told me to train.”  He cringed miserably.  “They both did.”

 

“You don’t need to.”  Hux tried out Phasma’s method, shaping the world around them, commanding the space though it was undoubtedly Ren’s. He’d begun to suspect that they’d brought more with them this time - where could Ren have seen a scarf such as Phasma’s before, so particular to the desert Niobe?  Or know just how First Order undergarments fit? Hux didn’t know those woods, but this river, the white little fish, it was all too familiar.  The few short months he’d spent as a child on his mother’s planet, when they weren’t sure if the commission would make an example of the Commandant for consolidating power, his mother had taught him to swim.  The river was his.  

 

Ren picked across the stones, inching closer.  “Maybe it would be okay.  For a bit.”  He ventured out into the stream, relishing the chill.  The current dragged at his robes, but he waded confidently to their mound of stones and sat down on the river bed, letting the power of the water pin him in place against the rock.  Hux patted the space beside where there was room for Ren, but he stayed low in the water.  Phasma deliberately turned back to Hux, giving him some space.  The struck up a conversation on the merits of different innovations in automated firing technology.  Ren didn’t speak, but watched them with wide eyes, arms wrapped around his knees.  When young voices rang through the trees, Ren shrunk down further and turned big wet beseeching eyes on them, afraid they’d turn him in.  They splashed him until he stopped looking so tragic, and let him rest there beside them for a while.

 

\---

 

Their routine seemed to be working, but it was only as reliable as Ren’s behavior, which was not at all.  The next time Phasma was on watch, Hux worked past sundown in the machine shop, building a new part for a customer in a hurry, and could hardly keep his eyes open for the walk home.  He took two dragging steps up the stairs to their loft, and was nearly bowled over by Phasma coming down them.  “Ren’s gone.”  

 

Hux swayed in place a moment trying to process that before he hurried down after her.  “Gone to where?”

 

“I’m not sure.  I was only gone a moment.”  Her tone was familiar to a hundred dressing downs of troopers being dispatched for reconditioning, but her eyes were narrowed with worry.  “There were men below the window earlier.  I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but Ren kept asking me to make them be quiet.  He was half-asleep all morning, I thought he was just in one of his moods.”

 

“And the men?”  They stepped into the alley behind the shop, looking about, hopeful that Ren had only gotten as far as the rancid smell of spilled blood in the gutter before giving up on his great escape.  “Red armour.  Gauvian Death Gang, I thought.”

 

“I saw them when they arrived at the landing fields.  The needed life-support maintenance.  They’re staying above the salt mine union office.”  He stepped out ahead of her, leading the way.

 

The union office backed onto a quiet side street, and the fire escape that led up to the apartments above it was left unguarded.  Ren was no challenge to find, standing square in the middle of the first room they entered, unconcerned with the two bodies that lay at his feet. 

 

“Did they recognize us Ren?” Phasma shook him by the shoulder.  “Does anyone else know we’re here?”  Ren stared at the viscera slowly drying between his bare toes. “Don’t fade out on us now,” she demanded, “this is important.  Do we need to run?”

 

“He spoke with disrespect,” he told them, over-enunciating in his odd jerky way.

 

Hux clasped his hands tightly behind his back. “I’m relieved to see that your sense of humor has survived your recent ordeal, Ren.”

 

The deep breath that once preceded throttling the life out of any lieutenant who pulled the short straw on delivering bad news lost some of its punch without the vocoder.  “What are you trying to say?”

 

“Because if that wasn’t a joke then you injuries clearly left you incapable of advanced rational thought.  We should reconsider wasting the resources required to maintain your person.”  Ren growled and ducked his head.  “Who could they possibly have disrespected that would merit you risking all of our lives over a matter of reputation? You?  The Supreme Leader?” Ren turned away, but Hux stepped up to him, getting in his face and poking his chest.  “Is that it? Your Master, who you’re so convinced will arrive any moment to whisk you away like a romantic hero in a holodrama?  Or your thrice damned Rebel  _ mother? _ ”  

 

Ren sprang into motion, snatching Hux’s accusing hand out of the air, his grip grinding the bones in his wrist together.  Phasma jabbed him in the side, breaking his hold before Hux could even react.  She wound a leg through his and he went down hard. The cloth wrapped about his waist was tacky with blood.

 

Hux knew their was no wisdom in continuing to berate him, but it was so  _ impossible _ to stay silent when Ren carried on so.  “What were you  _ thinking?” _

 

Phasma whipped a panel of a broken chair at him.“If you keep provoking him, you’ll be the next one on the ground.”  She let Ren free.

 

Hux leant in to check for a pulse on the closest body but jerked back when the mercenary’s chest  _ sloshed _ under his hand.  “What is it you did to him, exactly?”

 

“I started out striking him with my bare hands. But he pulled a blaster.”  Ren examined his hands as if they held the answers.  “I became… resonant.”

 

“You’re manipulating the Force again?”  He’d made a deplorable mess, but if this was the impetus for him to regain his grip of his powers, it was a small price to pay. 

 

Ren tucked his hands under his arms.  “Not exactly.”

 

“You’re liquefying people’s insides accidentally then.” Phasma waded through the wreckage.  “Stunning.”

 

Splaid behind the desk, the second man was only unconscious, and half buried in debris.  “What was this wretch’s crime?”

 

“I did not hurt him.” 

 

“He’s alive,” Hux conceded.  “I suppose ‘hurt’ is relative.”

 

“That Gauvian scum got a shot off.  It struck his associate.”

 

Phasma turned the body over with her boot and inspected his face, young beneath the wrappings and the bubbling scars.  “Could you perhaps…” Phasma made a vague waggling motion with an outstretched hand, mimicking the gestures of a Force-user.  “Make him forget he saw you?”

 

Ren stewed.  “I cannot. Not with certainty”.  He was clearly loathe to admit it, and his embarrassment in the face of chastisement only fueled his anger.  “The Force eludes me.” He may as well have laid himself prostrate before them, admitting such a thing.  The little boy in their dreams had never been far from the Force, it followed his whims, the only thing that ever came easily.  “The Force never eluded Darth Vader.”

 

Hux admired Phasma’s stoicism in the face of this dreck. She was always possessed of a greater patience.  There was no reward in stoking Ren’s ire, but Hux couldn’t endure him quietly.  “Darth Vader was a pawn to his master, in that way you’re very alike.  The Sith are self-absorbed and selfish, too invested in marinating in their own misery to achieve anything of substance. You let your pride cloud your reason, attacking these men. That sort of thing will kill you, sooner rather than later, and you’ll get us killed to.”

 

Ren stood stock-still.  His arms hung out from his sides, stiff with potential.  “Snoke does not hold with the ideals of the Sith.”

 

“No, I imagine not. What Master would perpetuate a system that hinged on apprentices killing their own masters to excel? You were a beaten dog, feral even in your subservience.  Too busy barking at shadows and chewing your own flesh to ever pose a threat to him, no matter how powerful you became.”

 

“Enough.”  Phasma swept the contents of the desk to the floor in a rare break in composure.  “We need to clean these two up before the rest of them get back.  The Gauvian Death Gang has enemies everywhere, but this fellow makes things more complicated.”

 

“Just cut out his tongue, why don’t you?”  Ren pointed to the ceremonial cuts in the young man’s finger webbing. “Look at this, he’s obviously a runner for the Hutts, almost certainly illiterate.”

 

Hux closed his eyes and sighed the sigh of a man whose patience wouldn’t take further testing.  “I think we’ve heard quite enough from you for today, Master Ren.”

 

Ren whirled on him. “You think I’m wrong?”

 

“It’s stunning detective work, but your keen eye may have also observed a considerable number of Yil-kenken frequenting this port?”

 

Ren’s furious silence was answer enough.

 

“A worldly scholar like yourself will then know that Yil-kenken are physiologically incapable of producing Basic to an intelligible quality, and that any illiterate workman-” Hux kicked the body at his feet to demonstrate “who does business in a port frequented by their kind will be competent in Trade Standard Sign.  Or were you going to suggest that we hack off his hands and toss him into the street? Better to kill him outright - it’ll amount to the same thing.  If you’re not up to scrambling his mind, killing him is not debateable, only the how.”

 

“Blaster burns.”  Phasma slipped her pared down blaster from beneath her jacket and fired at their wounds, obscuring the initial damage, and putting the Hutt’s runner out of his pain.  “It won’t hold up to a thorough autopsy, but I can’t imagine anyone will be looking that closely.  They’ll recognize the weapon that made them, no one asks too many questions if they think the First Order was responsible.”

 

\---

 

The streets were dark by the time they slipped down the back stairs.  The Union office had finished work for the day and turned over its premises to a sabacc game, attended to by security on the door, and the main square was brimming with nightlife, so they took a wide serpentine path back to the butcher shop, winding through closes and allies.  They moved slowly, keeping Ren in front of them to be certain he wouldn’t slip away.  He was limping badly, his exertions having exacerbated his wounds and sapped him of his limited energy. It was painful to watch.

 

Phasma stepped up, laying a careful hand on his shoulder.  “Allow me to carry you, Master Ren.”  He shoved her off, nearly overbalancing himself. She caught his stumble.  “We need to get off the street.”  Ren sped up, face twisting in silent pain.

 

Hux strode ahead of him, blocking his path.  “You’ll do as she says, Ren.”

 

“You will not speak to me like that if you expect me to help you.”

 

“Help  _ us _ ?” Hux asked, stunned.  What a fascinating window into how Ren was processing all of this.  “You’re the target we’re carrying about on our backs.  I think you owe it to us to swallow your pride if it will keep us from getting killed.”

 

Ren rose to his full height and loomed as best he could while still favoring one leg. “I’m the shell you’ve crawled into to hide, you conniving worm,” he hissed.  “The only bargaining chip you have to offer when the Supreme Leader finds you.  If I were such a burden, would you not have left me long since now?”  It had genuinely never occurred to Hux that they might abandon Ren after their first decision on the matter.  And why not?

“You drones have stumbled into the first reprieve of your miserable slavish existence.  You should enjoy the short lives left to you.  Leave me be.”

Hux leaned in, clinging to his level tone by the barest thread.  “Do you presume that we stole you from him?  That we spirited you out of Snoke’s loving hands?” 

Ren jerked back as if struck.  “No.” His fury drained away, leaving only a brittle resignation. “No.  He was there, that night. He told the scavenger to kill me.”

They were starting to draw looks.  Phasma laid a gentle hand between Ren’s shoulder blades to hustle him along.  “This is not a conversation to be having in the open.  When that body is discovered they’ll be on the lookout for anything suspicious.  We should hurry.”

 

Ren snarled at her. “And you have somewhere important to be?” He jerked his head towards the cross street, where the brothel district was lit up for the evening.  “I’ve served your entire lives.  Surely you would prefer to seek fortune elsewhere, slake unattended appetites. Not trail after me like defective nannydroids.”  He was grasping at straws now, desperate to land a blow but flailing without his Force-bound insight.

 

Phasma didn’t flinch.  “Unattended appetites.”  She hummed in mocking consideration.  “I’m sure we could see to each other if it came to that.” 

  
The volume of Hux’s laughter surprised even him.  Carnal fraternisation was permitted within the bounds of the First Order as healthy exercise, and was a regular enough occurrence in locker rooms and healing wards, but it was vehemently forbidden between officers of different ranks, to ward off the compromising problems such assignations led to.  The mess of it all was repellent to his ambitious young self, and as Hux had risen in rank there were fewer peers, and fewer still he would trust not to stab him in the neck before the afterglow could settle.  He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had sex.  Here and now, he and Phasma were brothers at arms, and if it were not for Ren scowling between them, Hux would have been glad to while away the evening with her, feeling something easy and good, shaking off the accumulated ache and sting of their continuous ordeal. Stormtroopers weren’t permitted that level of contact, for fear that it would engender favoritism and a dangerous camaraderie.  For Phasma to refer to herself as a sexual being was… novel.  Hux gave an uncharacteristic wink just to further infuriate Ren. “I’d be honored, Niobe.”

**Author's Note:**

> In typical Star Wars fashion, most of the disparate customs mentioned herein are remixes of Earth practices. I drew on these cultures with all the affection in the world, so if something rubs you the wrong way about how they're included here, please do let me know. I think most of them are pretty obvious, but if people would like some kind of appendix listing my sources, drop me a line here or on [Tumblr](https://the-negotiator.tumblr.com/)


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